The Viking survival game Valheim has surpassed 2 million copies, developer Iron Gate AB announced in a Steam update.Valheim currently boasts over 370,000 concurrent players, and that number is growing rapidly, making it the fastest-growing Steam game ever! It is on track to become a viral hit. In other words, in just 13 days, Valheim has surpassed the player counts of many other blockbuster games.

Compared to the genre hit Rust and the similar viral battle royale Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, Rust reached over 350,000 players in just over three months in 2017 and then peaked at reached nearly 3 million players. If this trend continues, "Valheim" could become the biggest viral hit of all time on Steam, having already reached the top 10 last weekend.

Nor is it being driven by massive publicity from big-name Twitch streamers, as is typical for such hits; just look at this chart from SteamDB, which shows that "Valheim" has already made it into the top 10 on Steam, and is now in the top 10 on the same day. It shows a steady increase in the number of viewers, not a rapid increase in viewers outnumbering players, which would herald a wave of popularity due to this kind of exposure. People are not only watching Valheim, they are playing it.

Because of its player count, Valheim is second only to Dota 2 and Counter-Strike in popularity: on the current list of most-played Steam games, it is second only to Dota 2 and Global Offensive, as of February 14, Steam is only 12,000 behind World of Warships in the top 10 all-time record holders for games on Steam. The only other game to match this list is the survival and crafting RPG Terraria.

Such growth in just two weeks is in stark contrast to the $60 blockbuster games from publishers with huge advertising budgets. Valheim started with a $20 game and rocketed off. Even the rapid growth of Among Us last year took a month and a half to grow from 5,000 to 370,000 users. (It should be noted that Among Us has a large mobile user base that Steam cannot track.)

Iron Gate AB clearly struck a nerve with Valheim; FOMO may explain the small jump past the 100,000 or so mark, but something about Valheim's combination of gameplay and price made the Early Access game launch to the stars .

If you're interested in this game, check out the Valheim Beginner's Guide or read how this game rekindled one author's love of survival games. Or jump straight to how to set up a Valheim multiplayer server and you too can struggle to please Odin.

Update: A previous version of this article, published on February 14, quoted statistics for the day; updated to reflect the 2 million sales news.